Review: THE SEED, Body Horror and Practical Effects Elevate an Okay Alien Invasion Movie

Three friends head out to the desert to watch a meteor shower. The night of the cosmic event,  something lands in the pool. Something with a face?

 

When the ladies wake up in the morning, something has sprouted limbs and is crawling around the back yard. Undecided between them if they should get rid of it or take care of it, the closer they allow themselves to get to it the stranger the effect it seems to have on them. Did this strange creature come from the desert? Or somewhere else, somewhere otherworldly, even? 

 

So. The ladies. There’s Deidre, a tall, leggy blonde making her way as a social media influencer. 

We’ve got Heather. They’re staying at her dad’s ‘second home’ out in the middle of the desert. She plays the anxious one once the creature lands. Finally we have Charlotte. Standing slightly shorter than her statuesque friends, she is the bookish, inquisitive one. Much to Deidre’s disbelief Charlotte is totally detached from social media. The only thing smart about her phone is that someone smart designed it. 

 

Inconveniently, but of course, the meteor shower knocks out all of their phones and cuts them off from the rest of the world. This is much to their horror because of their dependency on social media status -- especially Deidre. This is what freaks them out at first. Not being isolated in the middle of the desert with a strange lump in the backyard. If Deidre can’t post, her sponsors don’t pay. Oh, the horror. 

 

Now, no creature that falls into your pool, is covered in icky goo and stinks to high heaven should be considered a safe one. Turns out that the creature seems to have some kind of psychic effect on anyone near it. Whether Charlotte feels empathy towards it or the creature is controlling her may be a point of debate. Whatever it is, she brings it into the house and then it slowly tries to take them over, one by one. 

 

The creature is what we want to describe as a space turtle without its shell. The ladies call it ‘the bear-thing’. The Seed does earn its kudos by doing any effects with ‘the bear-thing’ practically by means of puppetry. One also thinks of Brian Yunza’s Society when certain sequences happen on screen. Again, all done practically and as equally corporeal as its predecessor. 

 

As the true intentions of the creature come to light and it begins to work towards that end, events in  The Seed take a turn towards the bizarre and the violence turns up a tick. We wish we didn’t have to wait this long for things to escalate as all this -- the puppetry, cosmic and body horror -- this is where the most appeal lies with The Seed, its practical approach to horror.

 

Likewise, the scenes of cosmic horror are well done. If it has anything to do with the effects, this is where The Seed stands out and is most entertaining. 

 

While we understand that humor is absolutely subjective, for a movie that has been billed as a horror comedy, The Seed is barren of laughs. We will laugh at pretty much nearly everything but there is very little in the way of humor in this one. Weird. 

 

It’s not so mean spirited as to be offensive, either. We’ve seen plenty of the Deidre types, the influencers, that are far more obnoxious than actor Lucy Martin’s portrayal. Likewise, Sophie Vavasseur’s Heather was as expected. Chelsea Edge get’s the… well… edge on both of them, playing the conscientious Charlotte, who is more concerned about saving the world than her friends are. The irony of her position, after pining to take care of ‘the bear-thing’ when they first found it, is not lost here. 

 

To his credit, writer-director Sam Walker does well enough to write characters that we don’t completely hate and are easy to write off as a mere casualty. Thing is, apart from the use of practical effects -- crack for horror nerds -- The Seed lays out a fairly standard alien invasion plot. Stuff happens, strange stuff happens, bad stuff happens, gross stuff happens, stop the alien invasion, they think it’s over then think again. 

 

The Seed is not a bad movie, it’s just that it’s an okay movie that may or may not rely on the horror community’s affection for practical effects to gloss over the fact that the story is pretty standard stuff.